Patrick Abboud came across Tayla Sekhmet’s petition almost by accident. The journalist was scrolling through Change.org while working on another story in Queensland when he saw it: “School bullying is killing me, PLEASE, PLEASE HELP.”
“I literally stopped in my tracks,” Abboud tells Guardian Australia. As a child Abboud was savagely bullied in school: dragged through the corridors, spat on and violently abused for years.
“This is a 12-year-old kid, but the way she articulated what was happening to her – it was like I was reading my own story, word for word. I stopped on the street, I broke down a little bit.”
Written by Tayla, and signed by her and her mother Kali, the petition describes her school life at Dysart state high school in northern Queensland as “a living hell”.
She writes about being called “fatso, weirdo, ugly, freak” every day; being pushed to the ground, being told to kill herself. Kids would throw things at her and film it, threatening to share it online; one boy would sexually harass her, she said, and spread sexual rumours about her.
“Please sign my petition to ask Dysart state high school to take a stronger stance against bullying and for the government to stop the school getting away with this,” she wrote.
Satisfied that Abboud would be well-placed to tell their story, the Sekhmets eventually agreed to take part in an episode of SBS2’s current affairs program The Feed. But the night before his flight to meet the family with a cameraman, Abboud got a devastating phone call.
“It was her mother, completely hysterical. Tayla had attempted to take her life that day,” Abboud says. He called off the interview. “There was no way I wanted to put her in a position that could make it even worse.”
Months later, Abboud was invited to meet with Tayla again, this time in Cairns where she was living with her grandfather. After her petition had gone viral, her bullies had begun to retaliate with such ferocity that child services deemed Tayla be removed not just from her school, but from her town.
Tayla’s story, among others with more tragic endings, forms the backbone of a powerful half-hour documentary that aired on Tuesday night, which exposes the fatal epidemic of bullying in Australian schools, and proposes a solution: national criminalisation.
“I’ve seen a lot in my years of journalism, but some of the stuff the parents showed me – I had to leave the room and take a breath,” Abboud says. “It’s horrifying to think that a 12-year-old could have ideas like that and torture someone else with them.”
Late last week, a website that hosted sexually explicit images of Australian schoolgirls went back online, with News Corp reporting that the list of schools involved had 19 new names added. According to the National Centre Against Bullying, one in seven Australian children are cyberbullied – but it often starts on school grounds, where it happens to one in five.
Currently there is no national policy or legislation against bullying. Each state tackles it differently, making for murky territory and a muddied message. Victoria is the only state in which serious bullying is punishable as a crime for minors. Anecdotally at least that law seems to be working as a deterrent for students, and former chief justice of the family court, Alastair Nicholson, believes the criminalisation of bullying should be federal, implemented on a sliding scale.
But there are risks: as Prof Dorothy Espelage warns in the episode, “it’s inequitable who gets punished”, and criminalising bullying could threaten already vulnerable kids.
“Yes, there is always a danger that you’re going to impact a community that’s already at risk,” Abboud says. “But the benefit of having something uniform across the country is far greater.
“I’m not saying, ‘let’s lock up kids’ – that’s not what I’m suggesting at all. But with anything else, if you steal a car or if you assault someone, you know there’ll be a consequence. With bullying, kids do it knowing there won’t be. So they continue that behaviour and it gets more severe.”
Abboud believes knowing that his bullies would be punished, and potentially stopped from bullying others, would have given him solace.
“There need to be preventative measures coupled with education, and national legislation,” he says. “It’s not just about saying, ‘Well, kids will be kids’, because kids are dying.”
• The Feed screens Monday to Thursday at 7.30pm on SBS2
